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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29569968">Ten Poisons</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/marmaladeSkies/pseuds/marmaladeSkies'>marmaladeSkies</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Assassination Attempt(s), Backstory, Gen, Harm to Children, M/M, Poisoning, Racism, The DimiClaude is in the framing device, Very graphic depictions of poisoning, Worldbuilding</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-05-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 22:40:51</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,947</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29569968</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/marmaladeSkies/pseuds/marmaladeSkies</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Claude has had a rough childhood. Here are some of the ways it’s gone terribly wrong, in a series of standalone chapters.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Claude von Riegan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>45</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Strychnine</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This fic will update on an “as I feel like it” basis, but I <i>do</i> intend to finish it so please don’t get discouraged if I go for quite a while without posting to it.</p>
    </blockquote><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Claude learns not to take candy from strangers</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Khalid was four, and his mother was sick. At first he’d thought it was the kind of sick like when a cold had swept through the palace and gotten each of him and his siblings one after the other, the kind where you stayed in bed and drank tea and didn’t do much more than sleep and use the privy. But the doctors were a lot more nervous than they’d been for that. There was a lot of rushing back and forth, and arguing with the royal apothecary about medicines, and calling for the surgeon to come help. Khalid had wanted to help too, but he was too small yet and they’d told him to stay out of the way and go play with his siblings in the courtyard.</p><p>	He didn’t want to play with them, though, and they didn’t want to play with him either. Arash and Vida said he was too quiet and mopey to be any fun. He should just put it out of his mind and pretend everything was fine, they said. It wasn’t like sitting around staring at the roses was going to make her get better any faster.</p><p>	Rehan, though, his oldest brother? Rehan was worried too. His own mother had gotten sick like this once, when he was Khalid’s age. Only his mother hadn’t gotten better. Khalid wanted to ask if that meant she was still sick somewhere in the palace, maybe in one of the other infirmaries, but he didn’t think Rehan was in a mood to talk about it. So instead they just sat awkwardly together under the ancient olive tree at the center of the courtyard as they waited for the doctors to come tell them everything was okay.</p><p>	A few hours in, after Rehan had gotten bored enough to try to teach Khalid to add and subtract a full year before the tutors were supposed to start him on it, a stranger came into the courtyard bearing a basket of baklava. He didn’t get far before being stopped by a guard and Arash’s mother, of course -the inner courtyard was supposed to be only for members of the royal family, their retainers, and the servants allowed to maintain it- but he waved a pass and was allowed to continue in.</p><p>	Khalid watched blankly as Arash and Vida, waved over by their mothers, ran to take one of the sweet treats for themselves. He watched blankly as Vida was scolded for trying to take a second, and he watched blankly as Arash’s mother guided the stranger over to where he and Rehan were sitting.</p><p>	“I heard about the Queen. Please accept my sympathies,” he said, handing Khalid the biggest piece in the basket.</p><p>	He didn’t really want to eat it; he was too worried to be hungry, even for sweets. Still, he took one bite to be polite. There was a rancid taste to it, mostly covered by the honey, and he frowned. The nuts had gone bad.</p><p>	“If you don’t want it, I’ll eat it,” said Rehan through a mouthful of baklava.</p><p>	Khalid shook his head and stuffed the rest of the pastry in a pocket before standing up to wander back into the palace. Maybe the doctors were done fixing his mother, or at least maybe they’d be willing to let him stay in her room while they worked.</p><p>	He was only a few rooms from the infirmary when he noticed an odd taste in his mouth. He tried to spit out whatever it was- remnants of rancid nuts, maybe- but his mouth didn’t want to open. His face felt stiff in general, in fact, and that stiffness seemed to be spreading. Something was terribly wrong.</p><p>	The infirmary. It was right there. The doctors would know what was wrong with him. The doctors knew everything. But his legs didn’t want to move right. Each step was harder and harder. Flashes of light appeared in front of his eyes and he fell to the floor in an uncoordinated heap. His legs twitched, then kicked at the wall again and again. A flash of pain bloomed in his ankle. More kicking. More pain. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop.</p><p>	Door opening. A horrified cry- he spasmed at the noise, limbs twitching and thrashing violently. He thought he heard his name. And then someone was picking him up, carrying him. He thrashed against their chest, flailing arms striking shoulders, chin, chest. They held on.</p><p>	A cup held to his mouth, a voice urging him to drink. His jaw was too tightly clenched. His teeth hurt.</p><p>	Gritty mud. Tasted bad. He tried to spit it up. Couldn’t. Then water. Better. Then more grit. More water. A dark room. Thrashing, flailing. Grit. Water. Darkness. Grit. Water. Darkness.</p><p> </p><p>	Khalid spent the next three days in that dark room, drinking nothing but water and eating nothing but charcoal paste. When he was finally let out and allowed to eat real food again, he was told what had happened. A very bad man had given him something that made him sick. His father had taken care of things. He didn’t need to worry about it anymore.</p><p>	A lie. But a necessary one. Four year olds needed to learn to play and socialize, not look over their shoulders for poison.</p><p>	Khalid was twelve when he heard the full story. How the doctors had found the suspect pastry in his pocket and realized why he was seizing. That it had been made with toxic kuchla seeds instead of pistachios. How the baklava peddler had been arrested and made to tell who had hired him, though he claimed he hadn’t known it was poisoned. How his father had forced the nobleman who’d hired him to eat the rest of the baklava piece and then continued to hold court as the man twitched and died.</p><p>	The peddler had gotten a much more merciful sentence- a swift beheading by the King himself.</p><p>—————</p><p>	“I’m sorry, did you say you were <i>four</i> when this happened?” Dimitri asked, aghast.</p><p>	Claude chuckled. There was an edge to it, the kind that Dimitri usually only heard whenever they received notice that Byleth had foiled another rebellion or coup before it could happen. “I wasn’t well liked then. Who I was, what I stood for. Still aren’t, in a lot of places. At least now they mostly know it’s futile to try.” Claude’s ascension to the Almyran throne had been hard-fought and much more bloody than either of them had liked.</p><p>	He leaned into the arm Dimitri offered him, sighing. “And that was only the first attempt. Just a year later...”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Considering all of the Googling I had to do for this, I am almost certainly on a watch list somewhere.</p><p>On a different note: I will be taking a nice vacation next week and will be firmly away from my iPad and not writing. There won’t be a fic or update next week, and possibly not the the week after either. Sorry for all of y’all waiting for Sunless City!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Hemlock</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Claude learns the importance of food tasters.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Khalid’s father was a very important person and ran a very important court, so it was very important that everything be perfect when it came to feasts with his courtiers. Every member of the royal family (even little Sahar, who still fussed in her seat and couldn’t drink juice without spilling it) had their own cupbearer. These annoying people took tiny little sips of wine and juice and tea with even tinier spoons so the family wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of having an outsider put his or her lips on their cups, and what were worse were the five food tasters who tried each and every part of every meal long before anyone else could have any, no matter how hungry he was.</p>
<p>	His mother said it was because they had to make sure the food hadn’t gone bad, but all Khalid knew was that he had to stare at his food, unable to touch it, while the adults made small and large talk all around him. He was hungry <i>now;</i> he was willing to risk a little sour juice or tough meat. But his mother smacked his elbow whenever he tried to reach for a stuffed grape leaf or fig, and wouldn’t hear any protest about it. It just wasn’t fair.</p>
<p>	Maybe when he was older, he could be a food taster himself. He’d be able to eat all sorts of things while everyone else was stuck talking and smelling without tasting, and they were small bites so he wouldn’t even have to eat much of the stuff he hated. It was the perfect job!</p>
<p>	Until it wasn’t.</p>
<p>	One day, during a relaxing lunch under a canopy in one of the side courtyards, his and his mother’s food taster interrupted a boring chat about boring adult stuff like taxes and whatever Morfis was doing near the border by suddenly standing up, knocking over a chair as she did so.</p>
<p>	“I am unwell,” she said quietly.</p>
<p>	Khalid looked up at her.</p>
<p>	The woman’s eyes were wide open, her pupils blown. Spit dribbled down her chin in thin, watery lines. Khalid would have been chided at best for being so messy, but no one seemed too worried about that right now.</p>
<p>	Maybe it was the trembling in her hands that was distracting them.</p>
<p>	“Hemlock, I think,” the food taster said as Uncle Nader went over to sling her arm around his shoulder. Khalid hadn’t even noticed she was bracing herself on the table. “I’m not sure in which dish.” She staggered as she tried to take a step. “I need-”</p>
<p>	His mother’s cup bearer rushed to her side, taking her other arm. At a nod from the king, they started to mostly-carry her in the direction of the infirmary. As they went, the food taster stumbled and fell, and the mostly-carry turned into a full carry.</p>
<p>	“Are they taking her to the dark room?” Khalid asked as a flock of servants appeared and started taking all the food away. They weren’t even going to eat now? He tried to reach for a date before the bowl could disappear, but his mother held his hands down. “Did someone make her sick?”</p>
<p>	“She’s very sick, yes,” answered his mother. “The doctors will help her, just like they helped you.”</p>
<p>	If Khalid hadn’t been so young, he probably would have noticed that his mother never said they’d <i>cure</i> her.</p>
<p>	And they didn’t. He never saw her again.</p>
<p>—————</p>
<p>	Claude sighed. “I never even learned her name,” he said. “She died protecting me or possibly my mother, and I didn’t even know who she was.”</p>
<p>	“You were five,” Dimitri reminded him. “How many adults did you get to know at that age?”</p>
<p>	Claude shrugged against his husband’s chest. “More than I might have. Fewer than I should have.” His parents. Nader, Hadil. His father’s concubines. His tutors. A couple of guards who hadn’t yet let him know much they disliked him. No servants, not yet.</p>
<p>	He made sure he knew the servants now, of course (the servants always knew more than they let on), but it was too little, too late for the ones who had become collateral damage in the attempts against his life.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Am I being mean to Claude? Yes. Will I stop? All signs point to no.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Words</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Claude learns that while sticks and stones can break your bones, words can hurt just as badly.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Words were a terrible poison.</p><p>	Arash used to like playing with Khalid. They’d chase each other around the courtyards, practice archery together on the grown-up target range (child-sized bows couldn’t hit targets that far away, but that didn’t stop them from trying anyway), and spent many an hour trying to learn the ins and outs of backgammon. Arash had a lot more practice, but Khalid had a knack for it that Arash didn’t, so their matches were closer than one would normally think.</p><p>	As time passed, their times together became shorter and shorter and fewer and fewer until they stopped entirely.</p><p>	He asked why, once. Arash just gave him a scornful look and said, “Because you’re not worth it.”</p><p>	That seemed to be the general theme of the words that followed Khalid like hounds after a hare. He wasn’t worth interacting with. He was an embarrassment. He never should have been born. After the first queen died, his father should have married Samira, first concubine and Arash’s mother, instead of a Fodlani whore.</p><p>	His cup bearer tried to tell him that words were just words. Immaterial and harmless. As if what people thought about him didn’t affect how they treated him. As if his food tasters didn’t draw lots to avoid tasting his meals. As if his combat instructor hadn’t stopped including him in sparring practice for fear of damaging his “delicate constitution.”</p><p>	(Luckily, Uncle Nader was willing to take over tutoring him, after giving the man a thorough and entertaining chewing out. Uncle Nader was the best.)</p><p>	The worst words of all, however, were the ones his cousins had for him whenever their parents came to visit.</p><p>	“Hey half-breed, let’s play!”</p><p>	His cousins never wanted to play backgammon or sneak into the grown-up archery range. No, they always wanted to play games like “throw Khalid in the pond,” or “chase Khalid with sticks” or “throw rocks at Khalid.” The last one was the worst; cousin Baqi knew he couldn’t get away with using slings anymore, not after breaking Khalid’s ribs that one time, but he had an arm strong enough that it almost didn’t matter.</p><p>	So Khalid did what a coward like him always did when facing three much older children. He ran away. And laughing, they followed.</p><p>	Khalid had just rounded a corner, intending to make for a window and climb into the women’s quarters for safety, when he ran into someone. A hand closed on his arm, as strong as iron.</p><p>	“Oh good, I was looking for an assistant,” said the royal apothecary, Asma, as she looked down at him with glinting eyes.</p><p>	There were a lot of words said about Asma too. That she was a jinn disguised as a human. That she was half-manakete. That she kept a devil trapped in a jar and fed it drops of blood in exchange for knowledge. That she was a devil herself, bound to service by Khalid’s grandfather. That she had a cursed painting that aged in her stead, and that she could never die so long as it was intact.</p><p>	Unlike Khalid’s words, though, hers served her well. No one bothered Asma. No one spoke badly of Asma, not outside of a hushed whisper and certainly not to her face. She wore the fear of others like armor. Even Uncle Abu Mehdi, who was as arrogant as he was stupid, turned and walked the other way when she came near.</p><p>	Her presence alone stopped his cousins in their tracks.</p><p>	“Oh, I won’t need all of you,” she said brightly. “Just one more will do. I’m testing a new antidote, you see, and-”</p><p>	All three of them disappeared before she could finish her sentence.</p><p> </p><p>	There were domed towers on all four corners of the inner palace, and the northwest one was where the royal apothecary lived. It was a cramped place, full of shelves and cabinets and piles of journals, careful stacks of vials and jars and untidy snarls of the general clutter of living. Crammed next to the door to the rooftop garden was a bed, barely visible under a clutter of books.</p><p>	Every jar was carefully labeled in thin, spidery handwriting.</p><p>	“If you’re going to be up here,” Asma said as she opened a cabinet and started throwing things onto a table. “You’re going to have to do everything I say, exactly as I tell you to. First, put those on.”</p><p>	‘Those’ were a pair of thick leather gloves. Khalid pulled them on; they were too large for him, but manageable enough to make him wonder if she usually took her assistants from the palace children.</p><p>	“Second, if you feel any sort of discomfort or pain when up here, tell me <i>immediately.</i>”</p><p>	Khalid nodded.</p><p>	“Third.” She handed him a knife, a cutting board, and a large white bulb. “Chop this finely.”</p><p>	He wasn’t good at it. Chopping food was for cooks, not princes, and his only experience with knives was when he was trained how to quickly stab anyone who might try to kidnap him (“not that anyone’s likely to get close enough for that,” said Uncle Nader). Sure, he could swing a sword, but that didn’t translate well into mincing a root. Still, he managed to avoid cutting into the gloves as he worked, and that was pretty good for someone with no experience.</p><p>	The bulb was made of layers, he quickly realized. At first he thought he’d just cut it into slices and then turn it and cut it again, but each slice fell apart into rings as he went. Maybe it would have been easier if he wasn’t wearing the gloves, but if he took them off she’d send him back to play with his cousins.</p><p>	After a few minutes, Khalid began to notice a stinging pain in his eyes. He thought about toughing it out (he <i>wasn’t</i> weak, or runty, or had a delicate constitution. He could handle a little pain!), but Asma had said not to. And if he disobeyed her, she might send him back to his cousins.</p><p>	“Asma,” he said, setting the bulb down. “My eyes hurt.”</p><p>	“That’s normal for onion,” Asma said, nodding.</p><p>	Khalid struggled to resist the urge to rub his eyes. If just cutting them caused this, then getting the juice in his eyes would make things so much worse. “How? Onion’s sweet and delicious and doesn’t do anything like this!”</p><p>	Asma came over and took the cutting board, sweeping everything he’d managed to chop into a juicing press. “Cooked, no. But try biting into one raw and you’ll regret it- a lot of things change when cooked or otherwise processed. Thank your servants for suffering so you don’t have to, young prince!”</p><p>	Khalid frowned at her. He suffered plenty, thanks.</p><p>	She handed him the cutting board with the rest of the onion, then set a handful of bright red Dagdan peppers down on it. “These next.”</p><p>	Khalid looked down at the vegetables. “Am I making you lunch?” he asked, surprised.</p><p>	Asma let out a cackle ominous enough for any witch. “No, what you’re doing is passing a test. Your great-uncle Imad, when I brought him here he refused to wear the gloves. Thought it interfered with his knife skills. Got some pepper juice on his hands, thought wiping it off was good enough. Didn’t wash them properly before going to the privy. Good object lesson, but I needed an assistant who learns by being told, not by making mistakes.”</p><p>	Khalid winced.</p><p>	“I can see why you’d think that, though,” Asma said after a moment’s pause. “Vegetables aren’t what I normally work with here. <i>These</i> are for the garden outside, to keep wyverns away. It’s fledging season, and young wyverns will eat anything they can reach.”</p><p>	“Oh, I guess you don’t want to lose your herbs.”</p><p>	“Herbs, nothing. I don’t want to be blamed for them dropping dead.” She gave him a sharp look. “Come with me; let me show you my garden.”</p><p>	The rooftop garden was full of flowers. Purple flowers, yellow flowers, flowers of the palest white, dead flowers giving way to dark blue, nearly-black berries, all sorts of flowers, each planted in growing boxes surrounded by a wire mesh to protect them from curious wildlife.</p><p>	Asma snapped out a hand to point at a box of yellow, bell-shaped flowers, all arranged on orderly sprigs. “Foxglove!” she said. “Strengthens a weak heart, but can also stop one. Overdose causes nausea, jaundice, tremors, and eventual death.” </p><p>	The hand moved over to the next growing box. “Wolfsbane. Used primarily to kill wolves, but the tribes to the west swear by it as a fever reducer and general cure for colds. I don’t recommend it, but I keep some on hand for your aunt Adila; if I control the dose, I can keep her from taking too much and dying.”</p><p>	As the hand moved over to the next box and its delicate purple blooms, Khalid spoke up. “Oh, I know those! Those are poppies. Can those really be dangerous, though?”</p><p>	Asma let out a short, harsh laugh. “More dangerous than you can imagine. Its sap deadens pain, and in a strong enough dose can deaden all of the senses and cause a deep sleep. It’s given to patients to spare them the pain of the surgeon’s knife, and is often used in combination with other medicines. Its dangers creep up on you, however. Once you take it once, it makes you want to take it again and again. People in its grasp will sacrifice money, rank, and their very dignity for just one more dose. Eventually they take too much and never wake up.”</p><p>	She nodded at a plant covered in large, white, trumpetlike flowers. “At least moonflower is honest about its desire to kill you.”</p><p>	Khalid stared up at her, eyes wide. “Tell me more.”</p><p> </p><p>	Poisons could heal. So too could words. And Khalid would hear a lot of them during his apprenticeship with Asma. Mostly <i>about</i> poisons and all the ways to distill, tincture, and alter them so they could be used in ways that didn’t involve killing people or making them sick, but they were still words nonetheless. Asma didn’t coddle him (she was too scary for that, to be honest), but she wasn’t cruel and she gave him credit when he did something right. She also gave him a good excuse to stay away from his cousins. His parents were too busy managing the country to let him stay underfoot, but Asma always had something he could help with.</p><p>	It was nice, having a refuge.</p><p>—————</p><p>	Dimitri blinked in surprise. “Asma? The woman who spent the entirety of our wedding arguing with Lorenz about perfumes, Asma?”</p><p>	Claude laughed. “Yes, that’s her. He never did realize she was winding him up intentionally.”</p><p>	“And she had your great-uncle as an assistant?” He frowned contemplatively. “She doesn’t look a day over forty. I don’t think we’ll be so lucky.”</p><p>	“To be fair, I’m about sixty percent sure she has laguz blood.”</p><p>	“Only sixty?”</p><p>	Claude shrugged. “I never saw her brand, and she just laughed at me when I asked if she had one. Now let me tell about one little adventure I had...”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>In which my addiction to OCs shows its face.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Arsenic</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Claude learns about Mithraism.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Halva was a simple dessert, but a delicious one. Toasted flour was mixed with oil and a thick syrup flavored with cardamon, rosewater, and saffron, scooped into a shallow glass bowl and allowed to set, and topped with chopped pistachios or almonds. It was normally made by the cooks, of course, but Khalid was having a lot of fun making it himself.</p>
<p>	Especially since he’d added a small amount of arsenic to the syrup. A <i>very</i> small amount; the line between chronic poisoning and building resistance was tiny, and he had no interest in making himself sick. He’d borrowed the smallest of Asma’s measuring spoons for the job, and even so had only filled it halfway before pouring it into the simmering sugar water.</p>
<p>	Now if only he could keep his siblings away from it.</p>
<p>	“You know we have servants for that, right?” asked Vida, reaching for the cooling plate.</p>
<p>	Khalid swatted her hand away. It was only the surprise that let him get away with it; his oldest sister had two years and a foot of height on him, and he knew for a fact that if she truly wanted something from him she was perfectly capable of taking it despite his protests.</p>
<p>	“This isn’t for people,” he quickly explained. “There are mice in the library and Umm Hawa asked for something to get rid of them. Asma said it would be good practice for me.”</p>
<p>	He hoped she wouldn’t go check. While it was true that Umm Hawa had complained about rodents in the royal apothecary’s presence, she hadn’t actually requested any poison for them yet. And Asma would know what he was up to immediately. </p>
<p>	Khalid wasn’t supposed to be experimenting with Mithraism. Asma had given him a long lecture on the subject the moment he expressed interest in it. It was a dangerous thing, to try to make yourself immune to poison by taking tiny amounts of it, and far too many kings and councilors had accidentally caused their own demise by trying it. For most poisons, food tasters were far more reliable; they were trained to detect even the slightest off-taste or texture that could indicate a tampered meal.</p>
<p>	Arsenic wasn’t one of those poisons. It was tasteless, colorless, and odorless, and was easy to buy in the city- a better rat poison was hard to find- and its effects took over a half-hour to start with a high dose and considerably longer with a low one. Khalid, who had already been nearly poisoned twice in his life (even if his parents were <i>still</i> tight-lipped about the first time), didn’t want to wait for a food taster to take ill long after he’d already eaten his meal.</p>
<p>	It <i>should</i> be one of the few that Mithraism should work for, though. At least, that’s what one of the heavy tomes Asma had him study from said. Sure, the tome had a long list of people who had died of it, but it also had a (much shorter) list of people for whom it had actually worked.</p>
<p>	He just had to make sure none of his siblings figured out what he was up to, lest Asma find out and take away the key to her cabinets. Luckily, Vida had yanked her hand away the moment the royal apothecary’s name was said. Unluckily, she was looking at him with plain suspicion.</p>
<p>	“And you’re making this ‘something’ a dessert?” she asked, crossing her arms. “On the day Baqi and Muna are visiting?”</p>
<p>	Khalid hated those cousins the most, and everyone knew it. Uncle Abu Mehdi’s children were all terrors, but the youngest were especially so. At least Mehdi was usually too busy to torment him nowadays. “Umm Hawa asked for this before we even knew they were coming,” he explained. This was actually true. Abu Mehdi almost never sent word ahead of his arrival, much to the annoyance of the servants who had to rush to prepare rooms for him. “Besides, mice like sweets.”</p>
<p>	“So does Muna.”</p>
<p>	He shrugged. “Even she’s not dumb enough to take some from the library floor.”</p>
<p>	“<i>Khalid.</i>”</p>
<p>	Khalid hadn’t thought his reputation could get any worse, but apparently associating with Asma meant he was going to try to poison everyone for the throne. Sure, there had maybe been one or two incidents where a purgative ended up in someone’s meal. But to be fair, the last time that meal had been <i>his.</i> Really, it was Arash’s own fault he’d ended up with it instead. Khalid hadn’t <i>asked</i> him to steal his dessert, after all.</p>
<p>	He looked his sister in the eye, then reached for the plate, broke off a piece of halva, and popped it into his mouth. He frowned as he chewed- he’d apparently burned the flour while toasting it. “See? A mouse would die, but I’m fine.” Somewhat. The taste made him want to gag.</p>
<p>	Vida threw up her hands and stomped off.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>	That night, he got sick. Very sick.</p>
<p>	His food taster didn’t.</p>
<p>	“You’re such a moron,” Vida said without a trace of compassion as he emptied the contents of his stomach into a decorative bowl that had formerly contained incense. “Eating rat poison, really? You’ll never make it to adulthood if you don’t smarten up.”</p>
<p>	He didn’t know how to tell her that the amount in the halva wasn’t enough to do <i>this.</i> A headache, if he misjudged the dosing. Maybe dizziness. All expected, all signs he needed to lower the dose. This, though? It felt like someone was repeatedly stabbing him in the stomach, and the less said about what was happening to his lower half, the better. Only the blanket over his lap gave him any dignity at all. Not that there was much of that to be had when you were sitting on a toilet in agony as your sister lectured you.</p>
<p>	“It had to be on the outside of my glass,” he said between heaves. His cup bearer was fine, and the spoons they used to taste drinks wouldn’t pick up anything that was on the cup itself. Once he touched his lips to it... “That explains everything.”</p>
<p>	Vida handed him an empty bowl as the doctor took his full one to examine. “Or you just poisoned yourself like an idiot.”</p>
<p>	Khalid groaned and reached for the lever to open the flue. The rushing water from the holding tank on the roof took away <i>some</i> of the smell, but not nearly enough of it. He just knew he was going to be as weak as a kitten for the rest of the week. So much for building up a tolerance before he could be poisoned.</p>
<p>—————</p>
<p>	“Claude,” Dimitri began. “Is that why you always wipe your glass before drinking?”</p>
<p>	Claude shrugged.</p>
<p>	“And told Mahsa and Loog to do the same thing?”</p>
<p>	He shrugged again.	</p>
<p>	Dimitri took one of Claude’s hands in his own and considered his words for a moment. “You’re worried about them,” he finally said. “That’s why you’re telling me these stories.”</p>
<p>	Claude’s expression was carefully, painfully blank as he shifted to rest against the arm of the couch they were lounging on. He didn’t pull free of Dimitri’s hand, however. “I can’t let them grow up like I did, jumping at shadows and watching every stranger and family member for the knife they plan to stab in my back. If I can just keep them safe <i>naturally...</i>”</p>
<p>	“Those situational awareness games you’ve been teaching Loog aren’t exactly subtle. He’s definitely picked up that most of his friends don’t know them.”</p>
<p>	“Or even just keep them safe <i>period.</i> As long as the murder attempts are fewer for them than for me...”</p>
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